5. Satie and form

During his Rosicrucian period, Satie went through a phase in which he
was called 'Esoterik Satie'. This was said purely in jest but it is singularly
appropriate in any examination of his use of form. He rarely used pre-fabricated
forms (as we have seen above, he only used sonata form very occasionally),
preferring instead to create his own obscure methods of organising his
musical material. The result is that sometimes on first glance his works
seem to be randomly organised, but in most cases closer investigation
will reveal a complex system of order which has been imposed upon the
musical material. He was interested in the mystical significance of various
numbers, the use of various proportional systems, including the 'golden
section', mirror forms, and the reworking of traditional musical genres,
such as the fugue and the chorale.

From his very earliest pieces, Satie can be seen to have an obsession
with the number three. Like the composers of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance,
he saw in it the representation of the Trinity and consequently most
of the pieces which he wrote in groups contain three parts: the
Sarabandes,
the Sonneries de la Rose + Croix, the Trois valses distinguées
du précieux degoûté. With the Nocturnes, too,
he appears to have intended to write two sets of three pieces each,
the Quatrième
Nocturne acting as a transitional movement between the two groups. Only
five of the proposed seven pieces were completed but the notebooks
testify
to the composer's original intentions. Satie's harmony is mainly triadic
(although quartal harmony is used to great effect in some of the Rosicrucian
pieces) and when he adds notes to simple chords, it tends to be superimposed
thirds, creating seventh, ninth, eleventh, or thirteenth chords, retaining
their triadic base, as opposed to the 'wrong-note' harmony used by members
of Les Six. Also bound up with the composer's trinitarian obsession
is
his extensive use of ternary form. This very simple form appears continually
throughout his life, from the Gymnopédies onwards. All
five of the Nocturnes are in ternary form, but Satie rarely uses it
with the
harmonic conventions it commanded in previous eras or with traditional
melodic development. Numerological details were considered to be vital
to the creation of a perfect work of art in the ancient Greco-Roman civilisation.
The ancient concept of golden section proportions, which was often
applied
to architecture and the visual arts, can also be applied to music. Satie
first began to use it in his music in the 1890s and Debussy too was
very
interested in golden section ratios but it is not known which of the
pair became aware of it first. The golden section occurs when 'a fixed
length
[is divided] in two so that the ratio of the shorter portion to the longer
portion equals the ratio of the longer portion to the entire length'.
Mathematically, this is expressed as the ratio b/a = a/(a+b) and in numeric
terms this comes to about two-thirds of the total length. Orledge
and
Gillmor both show diagrammatically how this principle can be seen at
work in the first movement of the Sonneries de la Rose+Croix,
but it can also be seen in other more complex pieces. To return to
the Nocturnes
of 1919, a very involved use of the golden section can be seen in the
construction of the first set of three pieces. Satie has composed
these
in such a way that in each piece the golden sections A (occurring about
one-third the way through the movement - the inversion of that found
in
the process described above) and B are to be found at the opening of
a new section of the piece. The golden sections marked 1 and 2 in
the following
diagram are those which correspond to A and B for the entire set of
three pieces.

Robert Orledge has shown, through an examination of
Satie's notebooks,
that the composer even attempted, after a piece was completed, to show
some evidence of proportion residing in the work. The facsimiles given
by Orledge are just some of many Satie worked on after the composition
of Relâche and show him trying to find a logic behind
the music by dividing the whole into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and
even 10 sections.
In this instance Satie failed to find numerological evidence of that
logic, but it remains valuable for scholars as it proves that incidences
of the
golden section in Satie's work are probably not coincidence, but the
result of great attention to numerological details. Another musical
form which
held great interest for Satie was the mirror-image. Relâche is
probably the best example of this, but Parade, his ballet
réaliste written with Jean Cocteau for Serge Diaghilev's
Ballets Russes, also shows this type of form being used by the composer
back in
1915. This structure can also be seen to relate to Satie's obsession
with the number three, as a mirror form must have three main points
for the
idea of a 'mirror' to be at all logical: the points of introduction and
conclusion, and the midpoint of the work towards which all the music
is
directed. In Relâche these points can be seen very clearly
because of the nature of the ballet, being divided into two unequal
acts
around the presentation of René Clair's Entr'acte. The
musical material mirrors itself around this break in the performance.
In Parade,
the effect is less clear.

Parade consists of eight main sections:

Introduction

Prestidigitateur Chinois

Petite Fille Américaine

Acrobates

'Suprême effort et chûte des Managers'

Final

Final repeat of Managers' theme

Suite de 'Prélude au Rideau Rouge'

All of these (excepting Numbers 5, 7, and 8) contain other sections within
them. For instance, the Introduction consists of a chorale, the 'Prélude
au Rideau Rouge', a transitional section, and the Managers' music. The Final
contains repeats or paraphrases of the music used in the ballet's three
main sections: the 'Prestidigitateur Chinois', the 'Petite Fille Américaine',
and the 'Acrobates'.

The midpoint is around the start of the 'Sinking of the Titanic' section
of the 'Petite Fille', but while this is numerically correct, the 'Suprême
effort et chûte des Managers' seems a more artistically logical midpoint,
as it is the second statement (of three) of the Managers' theme, the other
two appearances coming at the end of the Introduction and just before
the return of the 'Prélude du Rideau rouge'. In a work such as
Parade this is possible, where it would not have been in Relâche
because the mirror-forms used in the earlier work tend to be within the
sections, as opposed to linking the whole in one giant mirror. The material
used in the Introduction which recurs in the 'Suprême effort', and
in the concluding section containing the final Managers' theme and the
Suite au 'Prélude du Rideau Rouge' is the only music in the ballet
which makes no 'internal' connections. That is, it stands on its own as
framework material into which the four main sections of the ballet are
slotted. The three acts of the parade, the 'Prestidigitateur Chinois',
the 'Petite Fille Américaine', and the 'Acrobates' all contain
internal mirrors, and the fourth section, the Final contains material
from these three earlier parts condensed, reharmonised or varied in some
other way from the original statements. The connections between these
four parts, then, and especially the use of the internal Entrance/Exit
mirrors in each of sections 2, 3, and 4 join them loosely into a whole,
so that the only really 'objective' midpoint can be one that has no connections
with any part of that whole: which only leaves the 'Suprême effort
et chûte des Managers' to perform the role. In Parade it becomes
noticeable that Satie's mirror-images are rarely numerically exact, even
in cases where it would have been possible to make them so. This is a
tendency that can be observed throughout his oeuvre. The plan for the expanded
orchestral version of 'Je te veux', a music-hall-type waltz shows how
simple it would have been for Satie to have made his mirror perfect: Ex.
8 To replace D1 with a repeat of C, or add another repeat of C to the
end of the Trio section would have made it exactly symmetrical. It is
this sort of situation which makes it appear less likely that Satie miscalculated
in his beat-counting in a work such as the 'Airs à faire fuir' (the
three sections of which have 188, 108, and 187 beats respectively, despite
the first and third sections being practically identical) and a little
more likely that he may have intentionally disturbed the symmetry of the
work.

These sorts of involved processes which Satie used in devising the form
of his works may not, at first, seem to have much to do with neoclassicism
at all - they have no connections with surface gestures, or the use of
older works within a new work, or anything else to do with Western musical
history, but they do nevertheless represent a turning to the past for
inspiration. Ideas of proportion in art were used in ancient civilisations
but were neglected by composers until the innovations of Satie and his
contemporaries in the late nineteenth century. Form in the romantic period
was ruled more by the development of melody and the progression of harmony
than by any esoteric means of ordering notes using numbers - the mathematical
approach to music is one that the twentieth century has appropriated from
the ancient world and so must also be viewed as neoclassical in the wider
sense of the word.

Closer to the commonly accepted idea of neoclassicism is Satie's reworking
of traditional genres of music - in particular the chorale and the fugue.
There are no examples of Satie attempting to reinterpret these forms before
his enrolment, in October of 1905, to study counterpoint with Roussel
at the Schola Cantorum and a number of these pieces appear to have grown
out of his Schola exercises. It would seem that in this later period of
his life, the chorale became the subject of his sculptural view of music
as he seems to be composing the same chorale over and over again. In the
earlier ones (1906-1912: the Douze petits chorals [1906-1908],
the chorale from Aperçus désagréables [1908-1912]
and the two from En Habit de Cheval [1911]), he restricts himself
greatly in his use of rhythm as he did in the earlier 'cubist' pieces.
He uses few of the nonessential notes that earlier chorale-writers, such
as J. S. Bach, used to break the monotony of even note-values and the
lack of any change of timbre (all the chorales from this period are written
for solo piano or piano duet) only accentuates this starkness. In this,
Satie reveals himself to be a true child of the twentieth century - there
is something of the mechanical in his interpretation of this genre; the
piano is treated more like a percussion instrument, in complete contrast
to the traditional settings of chorales for voices. He uses no hymn tunes,
but rather takes only the texture of earlier examples and turns it to
his own ends. The harmony is non-traditional, too, and melody, for once
in Satie's music, is rather lacking (which also negates the traditional
idea of a chorale as a setting of a melody). The chorales written between
1914 and 1919 - 'Choral hypocrite' from Choses vues à droite et
à gauche (sans lunettes), 'Choral inappétissant' (Sports
et divertissements), and the opening chorale from Parade -
are a little less austere, in part because the settings of the 'Choral
hypocrite' and of the Parade chorale are for groups of instruments
(respectively, violin and piano, and orchestra) which accentuate what
little there is of melodic line in those works, than for any change from
the earlier style. The 'Choral inappétissant' is a little more
adventurous than the earlier ones, but remains characteristically concise
and still more mechanical than lyrical.

The fugues have been similarly transformed from the traditional fugue.
The third movement of the Aperçus désagréables
is probably closest to the traditional model, but the harmony that Satie
has used is so far from that used centuries before that the fugal movement
is entirely lacking in the extreme control that a composer such as Bach
seemed to exercise over his notes. This fugue could well be described
as an aural version of going cross-eyed, as the unvarying rhythm combined
with seemingly random modulations and a fugal subject that does not keep
within one key or mode combine so that the listener loses all sense of
musical direction. The two fugues of En Habit de Cheval - the 'Fugue
litanique' and the 'Fugue de papier' - take the form in the other direction:
they are not purely fugal pieces, but works that are made up mostly of
fugal elements, but with sections of non-contrapuntal music interpolated.